Paleontologists at the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum have uncovered a new fossil species that sheds light on the origin of mandibulates, the most abundant and diverse group of organisms on Earth, to which belong familiar animals such as flies, ants, crayfish and centipedes.

For some Arts & Science undergraduate students, participating in the Research Opportunity Program is a chance to get a hands-on taste of academic discovery, get some solid mentoring from established scholars, and gain experience working on a research team. For others, it’s a necessary step towards a lifelong career in research.

A new species of lobopodian, a worm-like animal with soft legs from the Cambrian period (541 to 485 million years ago), has been described for the first time from fossils found in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.

A new study of an otherworldly creature from half a billion years ago — a worm-like animal with legs, spikes and a head difficult to distinguish from its tail — has definitively identified its head for the first time, and revealed a previously unknown ring of teeth and a pair of simple eyes.

What do butterflies, spiders and lobsters have in common? They are all surviving relatives of a newly identified species called Yawunik kootenayi, a marine creature with two pairs of eyes and prominent grasping appendages that lived as much as 508 million years ago – more than 250 million years before the first dinosaur.

Jean-Bernard Caron, an associate professor in the Departments of Earth Sciences and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto, has uncovered a remarkable piece in the puzzle of the evolution of vertebrates.

Canada’s 505 million year-old Burgess Shale fossil beds, located in Yoho National Park, have yielded yet another major scientific discovery — this time with the unearthing of a strange phallus-shaped creature.